


To Grow a Name

by Notaricon



Series: A Rose in Bloom [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Drabble Sequence, F/F, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Intolerance, Non-Fetishizing, Non-Graphic Violence, Open Relationships, Prostitution, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-26
Updated: 2011-04-26
Packaged: 2017-10-18 16:46:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notaricon/pseuds/Notaricon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Every twist, every turn, every kink along the path of her life, she had befriended.</i>
</p><p>A brief exploration of some of the staff at the Blooming Rose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Grow a Name

**Author's Note:**

> A Note: I read the character of Serendipity as a trans-woman, and thus characterize her as such here. In-game, the issue is rather more ambiguous.

_An accident_. She had been an accident, they told her.

She wondered what her mother had looked like; a dirty waif crouching among stinking rags gone stiff with dried blood. She imagined the silence all around her, pierced by the thin, high, tremulous first breaths of the babe in her arms; another squalling, needy mouth among the many packed into the Alienage.

As a child, she’d crouched in the packed-dirt street and traced this scene with the grubby tips of her bone-thin fingers. Time and again, she’d traced it; scuffed it out; traced it. She never filled in the lines of the babe’s face, and the mother was always all watery, worried eyes.

...

Her first word was _hardship_.

The boys of the Alienage had trawled the jagged, smoky alleys, picking for scraps, each and every night. She had always trailed behind, watching for the partichrome glint of grit under the slant of the sun’s dying light. When the boys jeered, she simply smiled; it was the smile she saw her mother wear, sometimes. A smile which made her feel deep wells of something potent and strange opening in the heart of her; she imagined herself as an avatar of the mighty Aveline, her hair and banners streaming, when she borrowed her mother’s gentle, steely smile.

...

She was a nuisance, the boys said.

She didn’t act right. Didn’t do as they did; as she should. They didn’t like the delicate roll of her shoulders, when she shrugged. They didn’t like her slow, snaking walk; didn’t like the way it seemed to speak of things they did not and could never know. They didn’t like the way the bruises they left on her cheeks couldn’t shutter the light in her heavy-lidded eyes.

They didn’t like the things she woke in them.

...

An affliction. It was an affliction that made her as she was, the elders said.

Her bride-to-be had wept, the first time they’d met. The sturdy men acting chaperone had thought it born of disappointment. Any young woman might weep to find her future groom in cobweb skirts, testing the heat of their tea with the tender skin of wrists more delicate than her own. She knew better. She knew the geographies of joy and pain, and the lines they mapped across voice and breath and the hitching of hunched shoulders.

In hushed, scolding tones, she had fussed the mulish men out the door and turned to face the disbelieving, laughing relief sparking in the girl’s bright, wet eyes. She had brushed the tears from the girl’s face and kissed the salt of them from her fingertips. They remained together until the bruised light of morning seeped through the gaps in the walls. Katriela had never wanted a husband; but a lover and a sister, she would happily have.

They had married in the spring.

...

Tragedy had brought them both before the doors of the Rose.

Her arm hooked resolutely around Katriela’s supple waist, she had smiled her mother’s strong, deep-water smile. They had stepped forward as one, wearing the smoky tang of their singed skirts and hair as proudly as a courtesan’s fine perfume. They had walked into their future with burnt bridges in their wake.

She was a living luck-charm, she’d told Katriela, one evening as they sloughed and sponged away the sweat of the day, cheek to cheek and counting the trinkets their suitors had given them. They were housed and clean and safe, and clothed more finely than they had ever dreamed of being, before. And the women and men who might once have hurled stones as she passed by now paid to kiss the bare arches of her feet; the sweet skin of her thighs.

Laughing, copper-haired Katriela had dusted her lips and the tips of her fingers across the prickling skin of those thighs and declared herself the envy of the Hightown elite, for owning such a prize.

Every twist, every turn, every kink along the path of her life, she had befriended. There had never been a time that she had looked out upon the grand, gray expanse of tomorrow without an oracle’s wry smile on her face.

For that, she called herself Serendipity.


End file.
